Where I like to go on vacation

Many of you may know that I am not at all a city person. In fact, I completely despise large cities. Some straightforward reasons are that you are more disconnected from nature, the air is dirtier, and there are more people. I generally just feel a lot safer around fewer people. Just walking around in a large city stresses me out. I like living in Champaign-Urbana because it doesn't have the same crowded feel, and there is still plenty of green and fresh air. For any city folks reading this post, I can totally understand why you might like big cities, but I'm just not that kind of person. I don't like to visit cities when my family goes on vacation because I don't find sightseeing interesting and I am content with the food and activities around here. Instead, I prefer to vacation in the mountains.

My family is fortunate enough to afford about 1 major trip per year, either in the summer or in the winter. I am always trying to persuade my parents to go skiing in the winter or hiking in the summer. The two major mountain ranges I have visited are the alps and the Rockies, and I have visited both in the summer and in the winter.

Skiing is one of the main reasons why I like the Winter. Over the years, I have become a reasonably proficient skier. I can handle green, blue and black slopes with ease, but so far, I have never dared to go on any double black diamond slopes. I told myself that once I successfully descended a double black diamond slope, I would try out snowboarding (which I have been told is a bit harder than skiing).  A couple of times, I have stood at the top of one of these slopes, not quite summoning the guts to go down. One thing I have learned, though is that when you start feeling apprehensive, it is a good idea turn around. As I have experienced before, skiing is an activity where you certainly do not want to bite off more than you can chew.

One other winter time activity for the mountains is sledding. almost everybody has probably been sledding before, most likely at a local hill. I got to sled down a mountain In Austria. Sledding down the ski slopes is even more thrilling than skiing. When you sled, you have very limited control--almost zero stopping power and a very large turn radius. I often had to bail to prevent myself from hitting trees and flying off the trail into who-knows-what. Having to bail at high speeds can really hurt sometimes and making sure your sled doesn't continue to the bottom of the mountain can be tricky.

In the summer, when skiing is only feasible at extreme altitudes and for great costs, hiking is a great activity for the mountains. It is a lot less crowded, as long as you know how to avoid the touristy areas. The Valais, in Switzerland is certainly my favorite place to hike. It is a very pretty region with many small towns and farms on the mountainsides.  In addition, this region has many hot springs with huge spa towns built around them.

Unlike many people, I am not a huge fan of going to the beach. Maybe I just need to try surfing or something, but I have always found the beach a bit boring. There are several other locations in which I do not enjoy vacationing. Paris, which I have been to a couple times, is at the very bottom of the list. I don't really appreciate the architecture, the food comes nowhere close to its reputation, and it is practically impossible to escape the cigarette smoke from all of the smokers.

My trip to switzerland

This past summer, I spent 2 weeks in the Valais in the Swiss Alps. As a child, my dad visited Switzerland every year, usually staying in the same small village. I had been to switzerland twice prior to this past summer. Normally, my family and I just went on hikes with little equipment besides a backpack and hiking sticks. We never traversed anything more serious than roped ledges or occasionally some small cliff-like rock structures with spikes drilled into the rock face for footholds. On this past trip, my 10 year old brother (who is a really fit swimmer), was eager to go on long hikes with my Dad and I. Most of our hikes ranged from 8-12 hours. Some were more serious, where we stayed focused and tried to limit our time hanging out and taking pictures and simply cover as much distance and altitude as possible. Some hikes were more relaxed, where we stopped to play in the fresh cold glacier water in the creeks. My Dad, who had years of experience in the Valais, knew where the best trails were and where the least touristy areas were. We were able to avoid the crowded, ridiculously expensive touristy areas, and enjoy the peaceful Alps undisturbed (and for little cost besides the ridiculously priced Swiss food). On many of these hikes we only saw people every few hours. I was very glad to wake up, pack, hike all day, return home, eat a late dinner, and go straight to bed. I always yearned, however to try out something more advanced.

  This past summer, I had a great opportunity to try something a bit more serious. My aunt's Swiss boyfriend is a semi-professional mountaineer, and he was willing to come down to our Chalet to take my dad and I on a couple serious hikes. He showed us some equipment to rent, including climbing harnesses, crampons and ice picks, and we learned how to use them. We then prepared for a huge hike that would prove to be the best of the entire trip. We got up before 6 AM and each packed warm clothes, several sandwiches, and all our gear and drove out to Saas Grund, a very touristy town near a cluster of the highest peaks of Switzerland. We took a bus to Saas Amagell and then on to Stausee Mattmark to one of Switzerland's many water dams (the primary source of power in the area). Many of the touristy towns are car-free to  keep the air cleaner and also to increase revenue (they couldn't fool us).

We hiked uphill for a couple hours, reaching a moderate peak To give you a sense, there were several snow patches, and it was the end of July. We then hiked across a large snow field, maintaining a pretty constant altitude, until we reached the Allalin glacier. We put on crampons, and harnesses and grabbed our ice axes and we crossed this glacier, which was almost completely flat. We almost had no need for our gear. We then crossed a large moraine in between the Allalin glacier and the Hohlaub glacier, and then put our gear back on as we crossed the Hohlaub glacier. this glacier was covered in crevasses and holes at least 20 feet deep. In addition, there was a large river to cross flowing through the glacier which was partly concealed under ice. It really was a sight like no other. Traversing the Hohlaub glacier was an experience I will never forget. Even though it was a cloudy day, the rich blue ice in the cracks and the was small streams flowing through them were indescribably beautiful. We hiked uphill to the Britannia Huette SAC, a mountain cabin used by serious mountaineers to sleep overnight and wake up hours before sunrise to mount the highest peaks of the Alps. Cabins like these received supplies via Heli-drop and were powered by solar panels on the roof. We crossed a couple more snow fields, following a trail closed due to avalanche warnings. In our defense, it was our only choice or we would have been hiking until after nighfall, at which point things got seriously dangerous. We then finished the hike at 4:58 PM, unscathed by avalanches ending up at a cable car line leading to Saas Fee, just making the last ride by a couple minutes. It had only been a nine hour hike, but nonetheless, it was the by far the best one of the whole trip. It had been one of the most exciting days of my life, and an extremely memorable experience.

If you are curious, you can see a picture of me and the glacier on my Facebook wall.
I'm not sure this link will work, but you can try it:
https://www.facebook.com/lyle.regenwetter

Building Computers

For several years, I have found myself very interested in computer hardware. I lack this interest in computer software and programming; perhaps because I tend to be drawn towards the more more physical, tangible side of many things. A couple years back, I became interested in building myself a computer. Although many people call it "building" a more accurate term might be "assembling." When I heard people talking about building computers, I originally thought they were making the small chips and circuitry. What most people mean by "building" computers is purchasing the various components and then putting them together and wiring everything up.

Building computers is becoming more and more popular. Many of my friends have built their computers, and they highly recommended it over simply buying a pc. It is usually much cheaper than buying a pre-made computer, and it is becoming a lot easier over the years. A completely inexperienced individual should technically be able to build their own computer simply by following video tutorials on YouTube. Even though it is getting easier, it is still a very delicate task, involving rather expensive parts. Therefore, I thought it was a bit too risky to proceed on my own and enlisted the help of a couple friends, Neil and Kavi, who were more than willing to build my computer with me. They had helped each other build their computers and had studied the proper techniques to install several parts, so I felt like my computer was in pretty good hands. 

One of the things I like the best about building a personal computer is the ability to choose exactly what components go into it. When I built my computer, I set myself a budget of $750. I selected some parts that would put myself just under budget. Fortunately, I was buying parts just around Black Friday and cyber Monday, and I found some superb deals. I ended up upgrading almost all aspects of my computer for very little extra. In fact, most of my parts were 15-20% discounted. The building itself went smoothly, and it was finished after several hours. At the end, I had spent $870 building a computer composed of ~$1,100 of raw parts. A pc of comparable performance would probably have cost ~$1,500 in a store, and a mac of comparable performance did not exist, still does not exist and (sorry apple fans) will probably not exist for at least five years. In my opinion, my computer looks pretty bad-ass , but I'll admit that Macintosh computers may give it serious competition (but for 3 times as much).

I am glad that Neil and Kavi were helping me though, because there were some things that I felt nervous doing or was doing wrong. For example, I was really scared to drop the CPU onto the motherboard, because If I did it wrong, it was a guaranteed non-repairable 200$ breakage. I was also scared to apply too much pressure to some things, but I was surprised to learn that certain parts require some force to put together, like pushing the RAM into the RAM slots on the motherboard. They also caught me trying to put in parts when I wasn't touching some metal object to remove static that could potentially harm sensitive electronics.

One other thing that is nice about knowing how to assemble computers is being able to add or replace extra components when the need arises. For example, when I purchased nice headphones, I needed an amp and a good Digital Analog Converter that wouldn't squander my headphones' quality. It was very convenient to know how to add in a sound card, and I fulfilled my own needs with some money and about 10 minutes time.

My computer has handled everything I have thrown at it so far, from CAD to the most graphically intense computer games in existence. Unfortunately, technology gets old fast, and I anticipate that I will build myself a new computer when I go to college (and perhaps give this one to my brother). Nonetheless, I am already looking forward to that time when I will get to lay my hands on some beautiful new parts and assemble myself one of the most useful tools of my everyday life.

Picture:

Also, in case any of you are interested in the components, I made a list of the major ones:

CPU:                 AMD FX-9370

Motherboard:      ASUS M5A99 FX PRO R2.0

Graphics Card:   Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition 2GB

RAM:                G,SKILL Ripjaws 8GB (2 x 4GB)

Power Supply:    Corsair CX600

Water Cooler:     Corsair H55

Hard Drive:         Western Digital 1TB 7200RPM 64 MB cache Internal HDD

SSD:                 Kinston V300 series 120 GB Internal SSD

Case:                Raidmax ATX295

Sound Card:      ASUS XONAR Essence STX

The Music Cycle

Today I will talk about something a little less important than usual: my music listening habits.

I listen to music 2-3 hours a day. Since I spend so much of my day listening to music, I often find myself seeking new music to keep up the variety. My opinions of songs almost always go through a recurring cycle. Typically, I strongly dislike certain aspects of a song during the first couple of times listening to them. Then, after several times listening to the song, I start to appreciate them. I become almost addicted to these songs for a couple of weeks until I can practically recite the entire song in my sleep. At this point, the song loses its novelty and I stop listening to it. I rarely listen to it for the next year or so, and then once I have sufficiently forgotten it, I rediscover it for perhaps a few days, until my brain starts to remember the whole thing again.

As far as I know, part of my little cycle is reasonably common. I often observe and hear from other people that they get addicted to songs and then after a while stop liking them (or at least lose some of their interest). Sometimes, the songs make a small comeback, sometimes not.

My music library has always seen a rotating type of pattern regarding the popularity of individual songs. When I am out of music to listen to, I go onto the internet to find some more. I will immediately take a strong disliking to most of these. I will be saddened and start to think that the world is out of good music for me. I will then reconsider some songs that I previously discarded as garbage. For many of those songs that I am listening to for the 3rd or 4th time (after discarding them as trash multiple times during previous internet searching sessions), I will start to develop an appreciation for it, eventually fall in love with the song, promptly download it, and finally, place it into my music library. I will listen to these dozen or so songs almost exclusively for about two weeks (perhaps 20 times through each song).  At the end of this period I will be entirely familiar with them and search for more music in my library. I will rediscover some of the older songs that I had started to forget and refresh them in my memory for a couple days. Then when I have them memorized again, I will be out of music and will sulkily search the internet once more.

The cycle is very self-regulating. Every few weeks, I add a dozen or so more songs, and my cycle encompasses nearly 500 songs. Logically, I should be rediscovering more and more songs each cycle (because there are more songs), but this is not the case. This is due to the fact that the songs that have gone through the cycle 4-5 times, the ones that I have re-memorized over and over, tend to stick in my memory a lot better than others.

I find it greatly amusing that my cycle greatly confuses my music library on my PC. It likes to rate my music for me based on how much I listen to it. New music always starts out with a low rating, but after the 2 weeks of heavy listening, it realizes that I have been listening to them disproportionately much and puts them above all the rest. At this time, however I grow tired of them and move on. After that, however, they drop down in the rankings until they are at the bottom. This is usually when I "rediscover" them. Thus, I am always listening to the very lowest rated songs on my computer, which I find rather funny.

History

Over the years, I have probably spent about 900 hours learning history in school, doing history homework, and studying for history tests. That is almost 40 days, over 10% of a year! I have never enjoyed history as a subject. Furthermore, I always have difficulty pinpointing the possible benefit of studying history. Perhaps this is the case because History class has often required mostly memorization, and I therefore conclude that we don't learn anything significant. But I suspect that I have a more rational reason for disliking History.

I see practical significance in almost all of my other classes. Mathematics is useful for many fields and basic arithmetic is essential to succeed in life. English is useful, because it teaches how to draw significance from literature, as well as how to convey ideas in writing. Health teaches how to live a healthy life. Computer Literacy teaches some basic useful skills for using technology. Classes in the fields of Art, Chemistry, Biology, and Drama may not be very useful for individuals interested in other fields, but they are not required beyond one year. They are meant to introduce students to the subjects. Further classes are available for them to follow up on these interests.

History, on the other hand, is mandatory for 4 years at Uni, as well as throughout most elementary and middle schools. thinking back, however, I struggle to remember anything useful that I have ever learned in history. Given that I don't plan on becoming a historian, these lessons have to be applicable to other parts of my life. The only significant activity that I remember doing in any history class was the research paper. I cannot deny that the ability to research and concisely summarize finding is very useful. Why, though can we not just have a research paper class for one semester, instead of spending year after year memorizing facts that students are bound to forget almost immediately?

Now that I question all of this, why do we even have historians? What have they ever done to improve the world, besides waste future generations' time teaching more and more useless history? Perhaps documenting failures can help us learn from our mistakes. Perhaps if our government had studied historical failures of wars, they wouldn't have decided to invade Iraq or Afghanistan. But if nobody actually learns from history, what is the point?

I understand that some people enjoy history and I am by no means intending to bash your interests. It is not for me to decide whether studying, researching, and documenting history should be a valid profession. If students enjoy the rote memorization of history class, they should be free to take elective history courses. But forcing every child brought up in the US to waste a significant portion of their lives studying history is completely unfair.

What FRC means to me

Few people realize how much my robotics team means to me. Throughout the year, I dedicate on average more than an hour a day to robotics. Likewise, few people realize what an impact FIRST robotics makes on high schoolers across the world.

FIRST is an organization that runs several robotics competitions. The highest level competition is called First Robotics Competition (FRC). To FRC teams, the year is organized into "seasons" At the beginning of the calendar year, the "build season" begins when FIRST releases a challenge outlining a "game" that each team's robot will have to play. Teams have 6 weeks to design and build a robot that will compete with 5 other teams in 3 vs. 3 matches. At the end of these 6 weeks, the robot must be "bagged," and cannot be modified. During the "post-build season," teams have a few weeks to take a break before the competitions. Teams attend at least one regional competition, where they complete in qualification rounds before forming alliances and playing in elimination rounds. All three teams in the winning alliance at the end of the elimination rounds get to attend the FRC World competition in St. Louis. After 3 days of matches, 4 teams emerge out of multiple thousands of teams as the champions. Finally, after the competition season, the "off-season" begins, where teams focus on public relations, outreach, and fundraising.

For about two years, I have been a member of FRC team 4096, Ctrl-Z. Ctrl-Z is the only FRC in the Champaign-Urbana area. Our 30 (or so) members come from nearly a dozen schools in the area. During the off season, we meet 2 times a week. During the build season, we meet every day. We attend one regional competition per year, but we have unfortunately never qualified for worlds.

My robotics team means so much more to me than just another extracurricular. In just two year, I have learned so much. During the off-season, we learn how to work with large companies and how to seek sponsorships. We also learn how to speak to people and to increase public awareness of our team. Throughout the year, we learn how to use machines and tools. We learn how to work with pneumatics and electrical systems. We learn how to use Computer Aided Design for our 3-D modeling. During build season, we learn how to budget our time and money. Most of all, we simply gain experience building things. During the competition season, we learn how to strategize and cooperate with strangers. We learn to take advantage of other teams' strengths and weaknesses. I can definitely say robotics has helped me become a stronger and better developed individual.

Not only does robotics teach me countless life skills, it is also extremely fun. I always enjoy building things, but I think that the true team spirit is the most enjoyable aspect. After spending at least a dozen hours a week with my teammates for all six weeks of build season, I formed very close bonds with many of the members of my team. During competition, my teammates and I shared a team spirit much heartier than I have ever experienced in all of my time playing team sports. In addition, as one of the drivers, I formed very interesting relationships with the drivers of other teams. Your alliance partner may be one of your opponents the very next match, and this leads to some really complex emotions regarding other teams.

All in all, I am very proud to be a member of Champaign Urbana's only FRC team. It has by far been the most useful and fun extracurricular I have ever undertook. If I have inspired anyone to join, we are always looking for new members. I am absolutely psyched that build season is about to begin and I am looking forward to another great year.

Choosing a Position

I have been playing soccer for about 8 years-about half my life, I have just realized. I started playing club soccer for 3 years and then started playing for my school soccer team in middle school. Now, this is my third year playing soccer in high school. But even though I have played soccer for such a long time, I still don't know where I belong on the field.

During my time playing club soccer, my coach seemed to think I was best at defense- that's where I played almost all the time. When I moved on to play for my middle school, I played either as a forward or as a winger. During these past three years of high school, I have been playing in essentially any conceivable position (besides keeper). Everyone else on the varsity squad knows where they belong, what position they have trained for. I am not particularly good or bad at anything in soccer, I am average at defending, at passing, at shooting, at sprinting, at crossing. To make matters worse, none of the positions on our team really particularly need filling.

There is a reason why professional soccer players specialize at certain positions. Sure, in soccer aptitude in any specific field position will be useful when playing a different one. Nonetheless, each position focuses on different skills. Wingers should be fast and good crossers. Strikers should be good at dribbling and finishing. Center midfielders should be good at passing and setting up plays.

At lower skill levels, the distinction between the necessary skills for certain positions is less obvious. As I have moved from low level U9 soccer to high school soccer, I have really felt this shift. My friends and I used to play soccer in a swarm of swinging feet chasing the ball all over the field. Now all of my friends have settled into their own preferred positions.

I really want to make an impact on my soccer team, but I am afraid I cannot do so if there is nothing I am good at. I need to choose a position that I want to play; that I think I will be better at. I need to learn where to position myself in various situations and be familiar with the responsibilities of the position. I need to focus on skills that I am likely to use in my position. Only then will I be truly useful to my team.